Lot Essay
The quality of this recording is surprisingly good and Mick Jagger's vocals and Keith Richard's guitar-work are instantly recognisable as the fledgling sound of The Rolling Stones. The vendor's recollection of the identity of the other members of the group remains unclear. The second guitarist was almost certainly Dick Taylor, founder of The Pretty Things and early Stones guitarist, and the others can probably be identified as Allen Etherington and Bob Beckwith, two friends and Dartford Grammar School classmates who jammed regularly with Jagger, Richards and Taylor from around November 1961 adopting the name Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.
Peter Doggett's preview of the recording and his interview with the vendor provides a fascinating insight into the circumstances surrounding this historic recording of the earliest known collaboration between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
...It crackles into life with the coarse swagger of an electric guitar, pounding out a Chuck Berry riff with note-perfect pride. Then there's a voice, a thin, nasal twang, teasing out the lascivious sexual implications of a raucous R&B song about a go-go dancer called "Little Queenie"....The rock-solid rhythm of Richards' guitar and the confident play of Jagger's voice were, and still are, the core of the Stones' sound, and it's breathtaking to hear them in the context of a teenage jam session, taped for posterity by a schoolfriend. The performances veer from stellar to hysterical across the course of a couple of bars, but what never changes is the reckless sense of wonder and adventure that links the future superstars. Jagger careers through Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" like a natural showman, with that sumultaneous self-mockery and menace that would make him an icon less than three years later. Only when they move from black blues to white, with Elvis' Sun Records favourite "You're Right, I'm Left, She's Gone" does some of his certainty vanish. When they're tackling Chuck Berry, though, Mick and Keith sound as if they're walking on solid ground.
The vendor of the tape was one of the fresh intake of first-year boys at Dartford Grammar School in Kent in the autumn of 1954 where one of his classmates was a gym instructor's son called Michael Philip Jagger...various Stones' biographies refer to Mick's membership of the school history and jazz societies, though the vendor recalls that Jagger's affinity with jazz wasn't exactly intimate: "There was a small band of music enthusiasts in the school, including Mick and myself, who were bowled over by the initial wave of American rock 'n' roll. Then around 1959, when Buddy Holly died, we thought the music was going down the pan. Some of us got into jazz...Dick Taylor started out learning the trumpet, specifically so he could play jazz. He only switched to guitar later on....Mick hated jazz though. He used to calll it 'chink-chink' music, after the sound of the banjo which used to provide the rhythm for those trad. jazz pieces. He was much more interested in what was happening in America"...."Mick was always flamboyant at school, always keen to be seen as a character..." Dartford Grammar wasn't the natural breeding-ground for rhythm and blues, as the vendor notes: "The school prided itself on being interested in music, but not that kind of music. There was no official encouragement for what Mick and his friends were doing at all. I think I'm right in saying that Mick, in turn, took no interest in the way that the music was taught at school. I was in the school choir, for instance, but Mick wasn't".. Somewhere between a handful and a dozen R&B fans formed an unofficial R&B alliance at Dartford Grammar School. Besides Jagger, The Vendor and Dick Taylor were Allen Etherington and Bob Beckwith. "Allen was Mick's closest friend" the vendor remembers. "They used to live in the same street. They spent a lot of time together listening to records. But Allen was never as serious about playing music as Mick was"...By late 1961, Jagger, Taylor, Etherington and Beckwith were all meeting regularly to vamp their way through R&B and rock 'n' roll standards. Enter the one non-Dartford Grammar boy in the saga: Keith Richards - Mick and Keith had met as early as 1951, at Wentworth Junior County Primary School...In October 1961 Jagger and Richards happened to catch the same train. Keith noticed that Mick had some Chess R&B imports under his arm and they got talking. Keith and Mick had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor too, so a meeting between the two became inevitable...From around November 1961 well into the New Year, Mick and Keith jammed regularly with Taylor, Etherington and Beckwith adopting the name of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys..Jagger's dubious expertise on the guitar paled alongside Richards' painstaking mastery of the Chuck Berry sound so he moved over to singing and playing the harmonica. The Vendor mightn't have been a musician himself, but he regularly attended these informal practise sessions "They wanted to know what they sounded like so that they could get better. I had access to my parents' reel-to-reel, so I volunteered to tape some of their rehearsals"...Dick Taylor once decribed the Blue Boys as "pretty diabolical" and it's true that The Vendor's tape doesn't suggest that the band were ready to conquer Chicago. But as Taylor said elsewhere "....we never even thought of playing to other people. We thought we were the only people in England who'd ever heard of R&B".
That innocence ended in March 1962 when they leafed through a copy of 'Jazz News' and discovered that there was a regular Blues Club in Ealing. On April 7th, 1962, Mick and Keith visited the Ealing Club for the first time and saw Brian Jones in action on the cramped club stage. Soon afterwards, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys sent an audition tape to Alexis Korner, leader of the Ealing house band, Blues Incorporated. "It included us doing 'La Bamba', 'Around And Around', 'Reelin' And Rockin' and 'Bright Lights, Big City' Taylor explained "The one that's still very clear in my head is 'La Bamba' a favourite record of Mick's. He got all the words off the record, in pseudo-Spanish...they weren't real words at all..."
Thereafter, Mick and Keith jammed with Blues Incorporated at Ealing in late May; Mick actually joined Korner's band briefly; and then he threw in his lot with rival bluesmongers Brian Jones, Ian Stewart and Geoff Bradford, bringing in his old friends Dick Taylor and Keith Richards in a takeover bid for Brian's group. By July 1962, the Rollin' Stones were playing their first shows at The Marquee - performing a similar, though slightly more exotic repertoire to that heard on The Vendor's tape.
Peter Doggett's preview of the recording and his interview with the vendor provides a fascinating insight into the circumstances surrounding this historic recording of the earliest known collaboration between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
...It crackles into life with the coarse swagger of an electric guitar, pounding out a Chuck Berry riff with note-perfect pride. Then there's a voice, a thin, nasal twang, teasing out the lascivious sexual implications of a raucous R&B song about a go-go dancer called "Little Queenie"....The rock-solid rhythm of Richards' guitar and the confident play of Jagger's voice were, and still are, the core of the Stones' sound, and it's breathtaking to hear them in the context of a teenage jam session, taped for posterity by a schoolfriend. The performances veer from stellar to hysterical across the course of a couple of bars, but what never changes is the reckless sense of wonder and adventure that links the future superstars. Jagger careers through Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" like a natural showman, with that sumultaneous self-mockery and menace that would make him an icon less than three years later. Only when they move from black blues to white, with Elvis' Sun Records favourite "You're Right, I'm Left, She's Gone" does some of his certainty vanish. When they're tackling Chuck Berry, though, Mick and Keith sound as if they're walking on solid ground.
The vendor of the tape was one of the fresh intake of first-year boys at Dartford Grammar School in Kent in the autumn of 1954 where one of his classmates was a gym instructor's son called Michael Philip Jagger...various Stones' biographies refer to Mick's membership of the school history and jazz societies, though the vendor recalls that Jagger's affinity with jazz wasn't exactly intimate: "There was a small band of music enthusiasts in the school, including Mick and myself, who were bowled over by the initial wave of American rock 'n' roll. Then around 1959, when Buddy Holly died, we thought the music was going down the pan. Some of us got into jazz...Dick Taylor started out learning the trumpet, specifically so he could play jazz. He only switched to guitar later on....Mick hated jazz though. He used to calll it 'chink-chink' music, after the sound of the banjo which used to provide the rhythm for those trad. jazz pieces. He was much more interested in what was happening in America"...."Mick was always flamboyant at school, always keen to be seen as a character..." Dartford Grammar wasn't the natural breeding-ground for rhythm and blues, as the vendor notes: "The school prided itself on being interested in music, but not that kind of music. There was no official encouragement for what Mick and his friends were doing at all. I think I'm right in saying that Mick, in turn, took no interest in the way that the music was taught at school. I was in the school choir, for instance, but Mick wasn't".. Somewhere between a handful and a dozen R&B fans formed an unofficial R&B alliance at Dartford Grammar School. Besides Jagger, The Vendor and Dick Taylor were Allen Etherington and Bob Beckwith. "Allen was Mick's closest friend" the vendor remembers. "They used to live in the same street. They spent a lot of time together listening to records. But Allen was never as serious about playing music as Mick was"...By late 1961, Jagger, Taylor, Etherington and Beckwith were all meeting regularly to vamp their way through R&B and rock 'n' roll standards. Enter the one non-Dartford Grammar boy in the saga: Keith Richards - Mick and Keith had met as early as 1951, at Wentworth Junior County Primary School...In October 1961 Jagger and Richards happened to catch the same train. Keith noticed that Mick had some Chess R&B imports under his arm and they got talking. Keith and Mick had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor too, so a meeting between the two became inevitable...From around November 1961 well into the New Year, Mick and Keith jammed regularly with Taylor, Etherington and Beckwith adopting the name of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys..Jagger's dubious expertise on the guitar paled alongside Richards' painstaking mastery of the Chuck Berry sound so he moved over to singing and playing the harmonica. The Vendor mightn't have been a musician himself, but he regularly attended these informal practise sessions "They wanted to know what they sounded like so that they could get better. I had access to my parents' reel-to-reel, so I volunteered to tape some of their rehearsals"...Dick Taylor once decribed the Blue Boys as "pretty diabolical" and it's true that The Vendor's tape doesn't suggest that the band were ready to conquer Chicago. But as Taylor said elsewhere "....we never even thought of playing to other people. We thought we were the only people in England who'd ever heard of R&B".
That innocence ended in March 1962 when they leafed through a copy of 'Jazz News' and discovered that there was a regular Blues Club in Ealing. On April 7th, 1962, Mick and Keith visited the Ealing Club for the first time and saw Brian Jones in action on the cramped club stage. Soon afterwards, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys sent an audition tape to Alexis Korner, leader of the Ealing house band, Blues Incorporated. "It included us doing 'La Bamba', 'Around And Around', 'Reelin' And Rockin' and 'Bright Lights, Big City' Taylor explained "The one that's still very clear in my head is 'La Bamba' a favourite record of Mick's. He got all the words off the record, in pseudo-Spanish...they weren't real words at all..."
Thereafter, Mick and Keith jammed with Blues Incorporated at Ealing in late May; Mick actually joined Korner's band briefly; and then he threw in his lot with rival bluesmongers Brian Jones, Ian Stewart and Geoff Bradford, bringing in his old friends Dick Taylor and Keith Richards in a takeover bid for Brian's group. By July 1962, the Rollin' Stones were playing their first shows at The Marquee - performing a similar, though slightly more exotic repertoire to that heard on The Vendor's tape.